| Monday
June 11, 2001
There is a page of
discussion about Linux applications. We had a lot of View postings
over the weekend, see Saturday and Sunday
of the view complete with pictures. For a general summary of much older
material on Linux available here, see the Linux
index page.
I am trying to clean up, get Part One of BURNING TOWER off
to our agent and editors, and I have sent 57,000 words of Mamelukes, about
2/3 of the book, to Jim Baen. Things do happen if slowly.
I am pretty well cured of Everquest. I am not sure
what did it. In part it is because despite the game taking over more of my
life than I can afford to lose, I couldn't keep up with friends on the
regular servers: they are all going places I can't go, and it has become a
chore to get to higher levels; I'd have to make new friends at my level,
and I don't have all that much time. I'll look in on the place from
time to time. That's on the regular servers. On the player vs player
server it's a frightening experience: there are cold-blooded little
killers who hang about at level 10 looking for people to reach level 6
where it is permissible to be killed -- and killing and robbing them. NO
conversation. Nothing. Just kill and loot. And I note that these people
seldom advance in levels; they jigger things so they can pick on the
newcomers while remaining immune to higher level players who might defend
the newcomers.
There is no sheriff, and the guards don't provide a safe
haven. Even the banks are not safe. What these little hoodlums are
learning from this game is difficult to discern. One protested to a young
friend he had just robbed "It's just a video game!" but he had
in fact cold bloodedly killed a young girl for her gown; just a video
game, but still in all, no consequences to murder and theft.
Some higher level characters would like to be police, but the rules don't
let you attack someone more than 4 levels different from you. That is
supposed to be for protection and to even things out but the result is
that older players who have achieved some rank and status can do nothing
when a level 9 hoodlum kills without warning every level 6 he can find.
Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Now it's
not that way on the standard servers where players can't kill each other
at all (absent mutual consent to a duel); as I said my problem there is
lack of companions since all those who got on about the time I did have
long since gone to higher glory than I have time to achieve; and the game
is set to make it harder and harder to achieve levels the higher you go,
but that means you are restricted in the new places you can visit since
going solo into some of the high level areas is suicide.
But the PvP servers are not teaching much that I would
like future citizens to learn.
Anyway I think I am cured. I did have fun with it.
(See also a previous rant.)
I have been reading about Smart Tags at
http://browserwatch.internet.com/news/stories2001/news-20010611-1.html
and I am not at all sure I understand or that the writer
there understands. Where do the Smart Tags GO? They can't be implanted in
my server because unless Microsoft has paid massive bribes to pair.com
they don't have any way to alter my code. I can't think they are inserted
in my code by FrontPage because even if Microsoft wanted to do that, how
could they? How could they know what tags they wanted in here? I can't
believe that FrontPage edits out content like "Microsoft sucks dead
bunnies and rolls in carrion" or some such, nor inserts a tag that
sends you elsewhere when you encounter FrontPage or some other product
name.
In my web browser? But that is an invitation to use Opera
or Netscape or something else rather than Explorer, and again how do they
know what tag to insert? So where do these
mysterious tags go? Microsoft is quoted as saying they can be turned off
at the server, but what server do we have in mind here? Comments
appreciated. See Mail.
There seems to be a bit of a stir about Gibson and the
DDoS attack on him, and his panic about what Microsoft is doing in XP. I
have a good bit on that in the column. Gibson is wrong about not being
able to do IP address spoofing with older versions of Windows, and
Microsoft is not being a villain by implementing a standard that has been
in many machines including Sun systems for lo these many moons.
Implementing standards makes it easier to write security software; not
harder.
It will all be in the June column which I have written,
and part One should be up next week.
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